[rescue] Baby needs new sh... oh, wait.

[David Brownlee]

On Sun, 6 Jun 2021 at 07:56, Peter Corlett <abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Jun 05, 2021 at 11:47:18PM -0400, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> > I'll start over.
>
> > I think it's time for me to migrate my primary ZFS pool onto larger
disks.
> > It's almost full (in fact it WAS full and I had to migrate some storage
> > off it). I wish I could spare the dosh to go 100% solid-state on it, but
I
> > can't. It looks like the smart price point right now is to go from 1TB to
> > 4TB drives.
>
> The smart price point was buying them a month ago. Then prices and lead
> times pretty much doubled overnight. This was at the same time that the
Chia
> storage-based cryptocurrency all kicked off. Correlation isn't causation,
> but Chia does seem to be at least partly responsible for pushing an
> already-stressed supply chain over the edge.
>
> I've just migrated my data to an array of 8TB disks. The cheapest way to
get
> these was to buy an external and "shuck" it for the bare drive inside. The
> street price was around b ,150, rose to b ,220-300 (depending on lead time)
and
> is currently around b ,180. However, I'd usually sit tight and wait for a
> promotion so I've actually paid about b ,125 for my disks, a price which I
> don't imagine I'll see again for some while.

Just another chime in on shucking external drives workout out. I have
a 6 disk 8TB RAIDZ2 made from an unholy mix of shucked seagate
external Barracuda compute drives, one external WD, and whatever
internal drives I could pick up, in an old 8 bay NetBSD Dell T320
(with fans swapped out for noise abatement). It's not a particularly
heavy write workload, and the double disk redundancy should cover off
the cheaper drives.

Last drive was B#117 per 8TB as opposed to B#172 for internal drives. On
the offchance of not everyone already knowing, if you have working but
otherwise unwanted smaller drives you can put them into the shucked
enclosures to provide some residual use (at least on the Seagate, not
tested the WD as the shucking was a little but harder on the case).

>From the point of throwing away so much less metal and PCB waste the
shucking WD external drives feels a little better than the Seagate :)

David